Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 09.25.11 /2

[David Shove (shove001]

          P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   09.25.11

1. Afra Jalabi       9.25 1pm
2. Stillwater vigil  9.25 1pm
 3. Single-payer    9.25 2:30pm
 4. Silent auction  9.25 5pm

5. Animal rights   9.26 9am
 6. No pipeline!      9.26 12noon

7. Jim Lobe - Obama throws Palestine under the bus

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 avperika [at] gmail.com
Friends for a Non-Violent World
Afra Jalabi 9.25 1pm

Afra Jalabi to speak at FNVW this Sunday, 9/25/11
Syrian nonviolence activist will discuss recent murder of protest leader by
regime
Syrian freedom movement demonstrates power of nonviolent resistance

Afra Jalabi, Syrian-Canadian activist, will bring news of the surging
nonviolent protest movement in Syria directly to Minnesotans this Sunday at
1:00 pm. Friends for a Non-Violent World hosts the gathering at our offices,
1050 Selby Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104; 651/917-0383; www.fnvw.org.

Ms. Jalabi, whose compelling speech highlighted FNVW's Nonviolence in the
Islamic Traditions conference last April 9 (http://vimeo.com/27304780 ),
will tell the story of Ghiyath Mattar, the 26-year-old leader who was
tortured and brutally murdered by the al-Assad regime on September 10th.
Mattar's story is the story of all Syria's people, who steadily increase
their commitment to nonviolence in the face of violent retaliation by the
regime. And the story of thousands of nonviolent detainees remaining in
custody, including movement elder Dr. Mohammad Alammar, just arrested for
the third time.

"...after the death of Ghiyath (hours before his arrest he was joking with
me), something inside me shifted...So sweet and so new to the movement and
yet passionate and willing to give it all and he did give more than all...I
think he stands to give so much to the world. His death should not go in
vain. It should become a catalyst of a new global [awareness]," Afra wrote
to FNVW today.

Afra Jalabi's family has promoted nonviolent resistance for 30 years in
Syria. Thus she will also frame Syria's freedom movement as one of the most
inspiring and powerful examples of nonviolent resistance since the US Civil
Rights struggle and the independence movement in India of the 20th century.

For all who are dedicated to nonviolence this is an not-to-be-missed
opportunity to dialogue with someone involved in the prime nonviolent
movement of our time. This event is free and open to the public.

Please join us on Sunday at 1:00!
Friends for a Non-Violent World
1050 Selby Avenue St. Paul, MN 55104
651/917-0383 www.fnvw.org (call or write for more information)


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From: scot b <earthmannow [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Stillwater vigil 9.25 1pm

A weekly Vigil for Peace Every Sunday, at the Stillwater bridge from 1- 2
p.m.  Come after Church or after brunch ! All are invited to join in song
and witness to the human desire for peace in our world. Signs need to be
positive.  Sponsored by the St. Croix Valley Peacemakers.
If you have a United Nations flag or a United States flag please bring it.
Be sure to dress for the weather . For more information go to
<
http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/>http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/
For more information you could call 651 275 0247 or 651 999 - 9560


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MUHCC
Single-payer 9.25 2:30pm

Dr. William Hsiao, international single-payer architect lecture
September 25th 2:30pm- 4:00pm
Neighborhood House at the Wellstone Center Room 272
179 Robie Street East, St Paul, MN
Free parking in the parking ramp at the Wellstone Center
The Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition, Physicians for a National
Health Program along with the Minnesota Nurses Association is excited to
announce that Dr. William Hsiao will be speaking at an event on Sunday,
September 25th at 2:30pm at the Neighborhood House at the Wellstone Center
in room 272.  This is a FREE event and there is free public parking in the
parking ramp at the Wellstone Center.  Click here to register.

“Economist William Hsiao is one of the most interesting figures in health
care. In 1988, the government of Taiwan asked the Harvard School of Public
Health professor to lead an effort to overhaul the country's health-care
system. The success of the single-payer system Hsiao designed attracted the
notice of health reformers in Vermont, who persuaded then-Senate President
Pro Tempore Peter Shumlin to make a similar system a centerpiece of his
gubernatorial campaign. When Shumlin won, he asked Hsiao to develop a
variant for the Green Mountain State.”


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WAMM
Silent auction 9.25 5pm

WAMM’s 27th Annual Silent Auction Sunday, September 25, 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
St Joan of Arc Church, 4537 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis.

WAMM’s Silent Auction has been called “the best Silent Auction in town” and
features over 200 items such as stays at vacation homes, theater tickets,
gift certificates at restaurants, salon and wellness services, artwork,
gourmet dinners, and much more. Be sure to stop by the Hot Buys tables where
you will find small items to go. Enjoy a substantial complimentary buffet.
Have fun and support the peace and justice movement at the same time! This
is a huge project and a great way to get involved with WAMM. Suggested
Donation: $10.00 to $30.00 (no one turned away). Reserve a table for eight
in advance (call the WAMM office for details). Payment by cash and check
preferred. FFI: Call WAMM, 612-827-5364.


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TTT
Animal rights 9.26 9am

Tune in every Monday 9:00am to 10:00am on KFAI
TruthToTell, Mon., Sept 26 @9AM: OUR ANIMALS, OURSELVES: Animal Rights vs.
Welfare
Call and join the conversation – 612-341-0980 – or Tweet us @TTTAndyDriscoll
or post on TruthToTell’s Facebook page.

Except for our children – perhaps not even them – is there any subject that
evokes more emotion than our fellow mammals and living creatures – animals
other than humans?
We own them to the point of making them family – a killer when they don’t
live as long as we do – then saunter off to the supermarket to buy fresh
cuts of beef, pork, lamb, veal or poultry. At least a couple of our most
cherished holidays center around meals of meat – turkey, ham, leg of lamb.
We take drugs every day that were likely tested for years on various animals
held in captivity and injected or otherwise exposed to diseases we’re trying
to conquer well before we dare do the same to a human being.
We tolerate – perhaps because of our distance from them – the raising and
production of farm foodstuffs by way of highly restrictive feedlots – dairy
products, pork, poultry, eggs and the like. And, yet, we almost go
apoplectic if we see a dog or a cat or some other defenseless creature
abused in any way.
We’ve spent years roaming our zoos and aquariums, staring in or down at
hundreds of species who have rounded up and essentially imprisoned for our
entertainment. We attend circuses and similar events where animals have been
trained and shown to serve our interests. We ride them and drive them and
teach them to do the damnedest things – feats of astonishing prowess.
In many places in the world, we’ve used animals to round up and kill other
animals, or to pull our plows and carriages, or to race them in well-groomed
ovals and bet on them to won , place or show. And we’ve turned their
carcasses into thousands of different products – clothing, decorative
objects, and accessories, among many – fur and leather and jewelry.
In other words, animals have served humans of the world in a million ways –
and in almost every case, we simply take all of those uses – here and
everywhere else – for granted. Animals have also made millions for their
owners and users.
Some people have rebelled against all of these practices and abandoned any
use or encouragement of uses of any and all animals. Most of these advocates
call themselves vegan.
Others – especially those in the animal welfare business believe that animal
use for all the reasons cited have saved lives, fed us, sacrificed
themselves for our better health, and entertained us, mostly without abuse
or suffering, something we’d never tolerate at home.
But animals are abused. Animals suffer severely for making us food and
becoming our food, for entertaining us and pulling us around. The question
may be: can we, could we, ever get along without them and, if we must use
them, what can we do to eliminate the abuses we know take place in so many
arenas of our lives – even among our domestic dogs and cats.
I’m an absolute lover of all the dogs I’ve owned over the years. Hard to
live without one, as we must do because of allergies. Love cats, too, but
can’t be around them for five minutes without shutting down my lungs.
I’m a meat eater – a carnivore. I’m neither vegan nor vegetarian. But I
worry that our voracious appetites for cheap food and some drugs have led us
to imprison many animals in unacceptably cruel circumstances. Many of those
who employ animals in research and as food producers would agree. Others
cannot tolerate any notion of animal use.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI speak with advocates all around
the wheel of animal rights and animal welfare. You cannot believe how many
different organizations represent one view or the other along this spectrum
of animals in our lives. No program could possibly accommodate the hundreds
of various advocates for one position or another.
And yet almost all of us love our dogs and/or cats, birds, fish and sundry
family members with tails and such.

GUESTS:
CYNTHIA S. GILLETT, DVM, ACLAM, CPIA – Institutional Veterinarian; Executive
Director, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC); Director,
Research Animal Resources, University of Minnesota
UNNY NAMBUDIRIPAD – Executive Director, Compassionate Action for Animals
MARILOU CHANRASMI –  Co-Founder, Board Member and Former President,
Minnesota Partnership for Animal Welfare (MnPAWS), Former President and
current Board Member, Pet Haven, Inc.


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No pipeline! 9.26 12noon

Madeline Gardner maddyjean [at] gmail.com
Stop TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline!
 Monday September 26th.
Noon - March from the Royal Bank of Canada Plaza
60 South 6th Street, Minneapolis, MN1 pm  -  Rally at the Canadian Consulate
701 4th Ave. S., #900, Minneapolis, MN

On Monday September 26th,  we will gather in solidarity with our brothers
and sisters in Canada.  The Indigenous Environmental Network and other First
Nation and environmental organizations will be protesting TransCanada’s
proposed Keystone XL Pipeline in Ottawa, Canada.

The march will begin at the Royal Bank of Canada, who has investments in the
Tar Sands and are helping to finance TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline.
We will then march to the Canadian Consulate and hold a rally to protest the
Canadian Governments support of the Tar Sands and proposed pipeline.

Bring Banners, Signs, Hand Drums, Rattles

Facebook event page:  http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=248742141835305
Sponsored by the Indigenous Environmental Network ;
Twin Cities Tar Sands Action.
Ffi:  218 760-0284


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 Published on Sunday, September 25, 2011 by Inter Press
Service<http://ipsnews.net/>
Obama Throws Palestine Under the Bus
by Jim Lobe <http://www.commondreams.org/author/jim-lobe>

WASHINGTON -- The right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu could not be more pleased.

Not only did the allegedly most "anti-Israel" president ever repeat, for the
nth time, that "America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable,"
but also made crystal clear that Washington will veto any Palestinian
application to the U.N. Security Council for statehood in his speech this
week to the U.N. General Assembly.

Not once did he refer to Jewish "settlements" on Palestinian lands; nor did
he even use the word "occupied" - or any declension of that word - to
describe those lands and their people in an address that was largely, if
ironically, devoted to celebrating this year's Arab struggles to end
autocratic rule in their region.

Nor was there a word about the plight of the still-besieged population of
Gaza, or about the "1967 borders" as being the basis for any eventual
two-state solution, a formula to which Netanyahu and his U.S. allies
vehemently objected much to the consternation and exasperation of the White
House only four months ago.

Indeed, President Barack Hussein Obama, as his right-wing and Islamophobic
critics like to call him, said nothing to which even the most right-wing
faction of Netanyahu's government could object.

"I congratulate President Obama, and I am ready to sign on this speech with
both hands," enthused Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the leader
of the far-right - some say proto-fascist - Yisrael Beiteinu party, while
Netanyahu himself called Obama's address to the U.N. General Assembly "a
badge of honor".

"Listening to him, you would think it was the Palestinians who occupy
Israel," Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian stateswoman, told Israel's
Haaretz newspaper, noting what even the New York Times suggested seemed to
be the "hypocritical" nature of Obama's enthusiasm for Arab democracy
movements.

"He presented a double standard when he disassociated the Arabs' fight for
their freedom in the region from the Palestinian freedom fighters, who deal
with the occupation for 63 years," she said.

"What we heard is precisely why we are going to the U.N.," she added,
sounding a theme that has been taken up all week by many Middle East
specialists: By siding so ostentatiously with Netanyahu and against the
Palestinian bid for statehood, Obama has forfeited Washington's 20-year
exclusivity as broker of the clearly broken "peace process" between the two
parties - a point made implicitly by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy's
call for the General Assembly to upgrade Palestine's status to a non-member
state.

"Witnessing Netanyahu's stubborn rejectionism and President Obama's
inability to move the ball forward, President Sarkozy appears to be acting
on Obama's prediction last May at AIPAC (the annual meeting of the powerful
American Israel Public Affairs Committee) - that … if there is no credible
peace process, then others, including Europeans, will lose patience, and
pursue alternatives to direct negotiations, including at the U.N.,"
according to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now based at the
New America Foundation here.

Such alternatives will likely become more urgent, he noted, as a result of
the "post-Arab Awakening era, one in which Arab democracy will be less
tolerant of Palestinian disenfranchisement than Arab autocracy ever was."

So why did Obama, who, speaking at the same podium exactly one year ago, set
a deadline of this week for an agreement on Palestinian statehood,
capitulate so abjectly to Netanyahu and the Israeli right?

While his administration's defenders claim it has everything to do with
keeping the "peace process" alive and minimizing the chances of a new round
of violence between Palestinians and Israelis, the answer is politics, or,
more precisely, the perceived power of the AIPAC-led "Israel Lobby" in an
election year.

"Once again, the transformational Obama has been sold out by the political
Obama," wrote David Rothkopf, a national security expert at the Carnegie
Endowment, on his foreignpolicy.com blog early in the week.

Given his fading approval ratings and an economy that shows no signs of
substantial improvement any time soon, the White House and Democrats on
Capitol Hill appear increasingly panicked over their re- election prospects
in November 2012.

They will do nothing that risks alienating key constituencies, particularly
Jewish voters in a couple of key "swing states", but most especially Jewish
donors who account for an estimated between 40 and 50 percent of all
contributions to national Democratic campaigns.

Since the beginning of this year, but particularly since Netanyahu's May
visit where he was rapturously received at the AIPAC conference, his
Republican – and some Democratic – allies have deliberately and repeatedly
promoted the notion that Obama's alleged pressure on Israel to freeze
settlements and take other steps to advance the "peace process" was souring
Jews, nearly 80 percent of whom voted for Obama in 2008, on the president
and his party.

When, on the eve of this week's U.N. meeting, a Tea Party Republican, who
was endorsed by former Democratic Mayor Edward Koch to protest Obama's
allegedly anti-Israel policies, defeated a Jewish Democrat in a heavily
Jewish New York City Congressional district that Democrats had held for
nearly 90 years, that meme was transformed into conventional wisdom, thus
setting the stage for Obama's speech – or surrender - this week before the
General Assembly.

In fact, however, only seven percent of the mostly Orthodox Jewish voters in
that election said Obama's policies toward Israel affected their vote,
according to exit polls.

And, while there has indeed been a substantial erosion in Jewish approval of
Obama's performance, it has not been disproportionate to the loss of
confidence in his leadership by the public at large, according to a recent
Gallup poll.

That survey, undertaken from Aug. 1 to Sep. 15, found that a 54- percent
majority of Jewish respondents still approve of Obama, 13 percentage points
higher than his overall 41 percent approval rating, and similar to the
average 14-point gap between Jews and the general public seen throughout his
term in office.

"It's really about donors, not about votes, except perhaps in Florida (where
Jews make up about five percent of the electorate)," according to M.J.
Rosenberg, a veteran Israel analyst at Media Matters who worked for years at
AIPAC and on Capitol Hill where AIPAC wields its greatest influence.

"The surrender we've been watching lately is all about the money," he said.

"What AIPAC and other key groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the
American Jewish Committee do successfully is to convince both the White
House and Congress that every dollar that comes from someone Jewish is about
Israel, when, in fact, most Jewish donors are contributing because of a host
of liberal causes they believe in – from social security and gay marriage to
the environment," he told IPS.

"But I'm sure that President Obama believes that his financial support from
the Jewish community is heavily contingent on his backing for Netanyahu,"
according to Rosenberg. "And right now, everything he does is motivated by
his desire for a second term."

[So Obama throws Palestine under the bus. Millions of Americans will vote
for him anyway; too bad for the Palestinians - or anyone else on dozens of
other issues. American liberals have their GOP monster to avoid, so
they say. "What else can we do?" It's a free country, but free only to vote
for a teeny-tiny slower rush to the right and the dictatorship of the
corporations and the top .0001 percent. Perhaps it will grant citizens an
extra year or three before the worst. Not even a thought of progress. Only a
slightly slower descent into hell. "What else can we do??" -ed]

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                                                      clove shove




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